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I'm hardly admirable at any of this sharpening business but....I decided to give the newspaper strop a go. It's been a couple of weeks since I put a new edge on anything. I tried: suisin inox honyaki, watanabe nakiri, gengetsu petty, zakuri petty, and a carter funy. In each case it clearly touched up the edge nicely. I compared before/after by cutting copy paper and news paper...no spare veggies hanging about.

It was also my first attempt at using anything for a strop except my waterstones. seemed pretty easy/straightforward to get decent results. I just laid one thin, folded section near the edge of the counter and used the same motion as I do on the stones and as I've seen other KKFers do in various videos.

It's funny, I have tried stropping with compounds and leather, but nothing does it for me like a nice piece of inky dry newspaper over a stone, best strop I have ever tried. My boron carbide, chromium oxide and my kanoyama go unused, but I love a piece of newspaper.

I use a piece of cardboard held with spring clamps to the edge of a table. When I'm done stopping with that I put the fold of the newspaper under the C-board to hold it in place while I strop. I tried fresh news print paper, but it didn't raise the micro bur like ink does.

My very old & sagacious friend 'Tex' Grove kept all of his boat-working chisels in spooky sharp condition - he carried a long, narrow strip of what he called 'Pretty damn fine Flatland Bluestone..." which I think was from northern Europe somewhere, and that he claimed:

"The little guy works like a sum-***** 'cause of all the tiny Garnet chunks put lots of tooth on the edge with just a couple of strokes. Ya see the trick is to get some bite ta the edge and then sort of whap it inta shape with your strop - leave the teeth be, but polish the rest of the edge like heck and your chisel will just fly through cedar."

Tex's 'strop' was a recycled cardboard Safeway Egg carton - "Look, they're light, pack in my ditty bag, put down a polish like God's Teeth, and heck - I get a free one every week..."

On all my white and blue steel knives, a few strokes with a Mac ceramic hone followed 10-20 strops on a egg carton seems to keep them about a sharp as I'd like in my kitchen. The VG-10 Shun and Ryusen knives seem to want some work with a 6000 grit shapton stone followed by the strop - they seem pretty unimpressed by the ceramic hone, I'm not sure why.